The system often just freezes up without any warning, it doesn't gradually start getting slower or something like that, and every time I look the avarage system load is below 20% (usually not even 10%).
When looking at dmesg
, there's one thing that always seems to come back though. The message composite sync not supported
. These freezes are getiing indredibly annoying as I always lose all my work I haven't saved yet, and the last time it froze up happened while I was saving something (I don't think I need to tell you that that file was gone).
Can annyone give me any pointers (and hopefully solutions as well), to where this problem lies? If you've found something that might be the cause, but you don't know how to fix it, just put it in the comments, please. That way I can do a bit of research myself maybe.
Dmesg: http://pastebin.com/ZeiULvSK
… And I thought there was a kernel.log
file in /var/log
, but apparently I was wrong.
More recent dmesg
: http://pastebin.com/CXETguti
This is the output taken right after closing VVVVVV (a game).
I found out 2 things today that both point to the same thing… The dmesg
is full of Nouveau errors, and games lag like hell, and some don't start at all. The conclusion is that it refuses to use the NVidia drivers.
Help on getting them to work would be nice as well. More info on that: https://askubuntu.com/a/83995/18953
When adding nomodeset
to my kernel line in GRUB I'm stuck with a small screen resolution, limited amount of colours (gradients look like crap), the screen becomes laggy, but the errors don't crop up anymore in dmesg
. I've experienced no freezes with this parameter added, but I haven't worked longer than 10 minutes with nomodeset
because making mindmaps on a small resolution is annoying.
My graphic card is an NVidia Quadro NVS 110M.
robin@robin-Latitude-D620:~$ lspci | grep -i vga
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation G72M [Quadro NVS 110M/GeForce Go 7300] (rev a1)
robin@robin-Latitude-D620:~$ sudo lshw -class display
[sudo] password for robin:
*-display
description: VGA compatible controller
product: G72M [Quadro NVS 110M/GeForce Go 7300]
vendor: nVidia Corporation
physical id: 0
bus info: pci@0000:01:00.0
version: a1
width: 64 bits
clock: 33MHz
capabilities: pm msi pciexpress vga_controller bus_master cap_list rom
configuration: driver=nouveau latency=0
resources: irq:16 memory:ed000000-edffffff memory:d0000000-dfffffff memory:ee000000-eeffffff memory:ef000000-ef01ffff
What I did to install the NVidia drivers
Installed nvidia-current
with Jockey, removed it again (had to try 2 times, first time failed), added a PPA for a newer version, installed nvidia-current
again (this time with the terminal), rebooted.
Best Answer
Maverick was particularly prone to graphics freezes with the standard Open-Source nouveau drivers.
You can uplift you X-System using the X-Updates PPA
You can then install the latest NVIDIA drivers.
As you have noted, the Open-Source drivers still seems to take precedent over the NVIDIA drivers.
One-way to force the use of the NVIDIA drivers is to black-list the open-source drivers:
To do this:
gksu gedit
(either run this in a terminal or in the run dialogue (ALT+F2)).Then open the following file:
/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf
.Now open the following file:
/etc/modprobe.d/nvidia-graphics-drivers.conf
:
Now install the nvidia-current driver:
sudo apt-get install nvidia-current
One happy side-effect of using the nvidia drivers rather than the old maverick open-source drivers is that the temperature/battery usage is greatly reduced.
source
alternative force usage of nvidia driver
The following will actually remove the nouveau driver before reinstalling the nvidia driver (again).
Now make sure you have the headers installed before reinstalling the nvidia driver
Now rename your xorg.conf before recreating the file:
If nvidia-xconfig still gives you an issue run,
reversing
if you get black-screens then do the following to reverse:
First, boot with recovery and choose terminal with networking
Then rename the xorg.conf file
The reinstall the opensource driver:
You may or may not also have to remove the "blacklist" lines added at the top of this answer.